Playboy.com's Exclusive Interview with Justice

By Playboy.com Staff May 14, 2012

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We sat down with French electro duo Justice to talk about girls, tours, music and Playboy.

While we were in L.A. we ran into French electro music duo Justice on the West Coast leg of their worldwide tour. Famous for their Grammy-winning debut album †, the bad-boy poster boys of electro Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay have been touring and creating albums ever since. To find out more about Justice, their documentary film or check if they’re touring near you, go to their Facebook page.

Playboy.com: What did you guys do in the week between the two Coachella shows?

de Rosnay: We played shows in Vegas, L.A. and Oakland and then came back here.

Playboy.com: Are you on tour right now?

de Rosnay: Yeah, we’re doing a West Coast tour.

Playboy.com: Did you guys like having the two Coachella weekends?

Augé: It’s nice. For us it’s good because we had some small technical problems the first weekend.

de Rosnay: It’s cool to play twice in front of different people. I imagine people come to both weekends. It’s a very nice festival.

Playboy.com: How long are you on tour?

de Rosnay: Until the end of 2012.

Playboy.com: So you’re not only doing the West Coast then.

de Rosnay: We’re doing the summer festivals, and then we’re re-doing Europe in bigger venues, then the second half of the United States.

Playboy.com: So which cities have the hottest women?

Augé: Well, of course L.A., they just have a higher proportion of gorgeous women.

de Rosnay: But we’re married so…

Playboy.com: Is there anywhere you haven’t played that you would like to?

de Rosnay: Yeah, Montreal, which we didn’t get to do last year, so we’re doing the Osheaga festival in August.

Playboy.com: We saw you a few years ago; it was really awesome with the visuals and the cross. Have you changed the aesthetics for this tour with regards to what happens on stage?

de Rosnay: We’ve kept certain elements. The ones we’ve kept, we’ve transformed them. I think when you come see us perform for a second time, you’ll recognize that it is Justice, but at the same time everything will feel and look different.

Augé: There are little surprises.

de Rosnay: And big changes!

Playboy.com: Are there any artists you would like to collaborate with?

Both: No.

de Rosnay: There are a lot of groups we like, but we think that if you make a song and it makes you think of someone, then maybe you can collaborate, but never the opposite. We don’t really want to do collaborations and then see what happens afterwards. It’s the project that would demand the collaboration, not the other way around.

Playboy.com: Do you guys have a new music video coming out soon?

de Rosnay: Yes, we’re finishing one up now.

Playboy.com: Is it with director Romain Gavras?

Augé: No, not him. We can’t tell you who it is yet.

Playboy.com: What are you guys listening to on the road?

de Rosnay: We always listen to the same old stuff. We’re not really discovering too many groups lately, so what we listen to stays pretty much the same.

Playboy.com: Are there any European groups you want to share with the world?

de Rosnay: Tons, but to be brief, Breakbot will be releasing his album soon on our label, Ed Banger. In fact, the album is very Playboy. You can imagine Hugh Hefner listening to Breakbot in his house.

Playboy.com: What’s your first memory of Playboy?

de Rosnay: I had a comic book that was called Le Petit Spirou. (In the book) he spends his time trying to steal Playboys. It wasn’t Playboy because they weren’t allowed to use the name, but you could see that he was trying to get Playboys from the store. Playboy in France is different, well, it is different in all countries, but in the ’90s it wasn’t super. They were still using standards of women and lifestyle that belonged to another era.

Playboy.com: I imagine those standards didn’t exist in Europe.

de Rosnay: Yeah, and then it changed in the 2000s and it became a pretty cool magazine. I believe it has changed again now. There were five or six years when we bought Playboy every month since it had become so interesting.

Playboy.com: Was it the same for you, Gaspard?

Augé: I would go to a magazine shop where they would strangely put the erotic magazines on the lower levels. So one day I came with a folder and I put it on the magazine and pretended like I was looking for something and then just left with the magazine.

Playboy.com: Do you have a favorite Playmate?

de Rosnay: I don’t really know their names.

Playboy.com: The one with the big boobs.

Augé: I like redheads.

de Rosnay: Well what was good about the French Playboy from 2007 and 2008 was that there were models who were the girl-next-door type, but in a French way.

Playboy.com: The kind of girl who could be your neighbor.

de Rosnay: Yeah, if you’re lucky! Your neighbors are never like that.

Playboy.com: Do you think you’ll release an album in 2013? Are you working on anything now?

de Rosnay: No, we’re not in any rush. We’re touring full time so we don’t really have time. We like separating things as well. When we tour, we tour and don’t make music, and when we make music we don’t do any shows, we just create. We like taking our time, we’re in no rush.

Playboy.com: Do you have any funny stories from the road?

de Rosnay: It’s tough to choose, which is why we made a documentary in 2008 (A Cross the Universe).

Playboy.com: A very great film. Were you mixing fiction and reality at times? It seemed like at times it was docu-fiction.

Augé: No, but that impression does come through. It is one hour from 300 hours of footage, so it is pretty accelerated in terms of pace.

Playboy.com: So your lives are really that crazy at times!

de Rosnay: Crazy things happen in everyone’s life. Like Gaspard was saying, when you film for three weeks and film 300 hours and keep 55 minutes of footage, it is really only the best moments that you see so it seems crazy. I’m sure if we filmed you for three weeks all the time and only kept the best part, there would be some crazy stuff.

Playboy.com: Yes, but probably not on same the level as you two. Do you guys find it easy to go unrecognized in North America?

de Rosnay: We’re not really known. Even though Justice is known, we can walk down the street without people noticing us. When people do approach us, though, it’s not annoying.

Playboy.com: Was it a choice to not put your faces in your clips? That the music would be the image, and you wouldn’t be the emblems?

de Rosnay: Everything we do is a choice. We’re not trying to hide. But we think there are more interesting things to put up front than ourselves as images. It is not on purpose to stay hidden; we just think that objectively it is less interesting to see us rather than other things.